Thursday, August 30, 2007

Details: Now this is a great project that you can probably try at home - it's a beautiful modular house (similar to the Cafe Corner set) that was made as an original alternate model for the 4954 "Model Town House" kit (which, by the way, you can get free shipping on if you order through Amazon). The nice thing about little projects like this one is that you can easily determine if you have the parts or not - in fact, when I was little, the LEGO® club magazine (I think it was called Mania Magazine at the time) used to feature instructions for models that could be easily built from just one widely-available kit. Enough of the "marketing" type stuff though, truth be told this is also a very well-designed original house too. I love the architecture here, that upper balcony, the awnings for the door and windows (the ones on the top look like the part that goes over the car wheels in the main model!). There's even a flower bed and outdoor lighting here (creative ways of doing both of those, too). The bench in the back is a great use of studs-not-on-top parts in this scale, and there's even a proper staircase featured. I would have preferred some furniture (wasn't the original point of modular building to make it possible to show off furnishings?), but oh well. It's difficult enough to get things like that textured studs-not-on-top front to work well.

5 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I just built it, and it's awesome - maybe more beautiful than the three original models. I did make a few changes - put a window in the back wall instead of in the tunnel, and placed the balcony door more to the right. And added a porch under the balcony.

I did not make the floors , also because I didn't understand how to make them (and how the balcony was attached is a mystery to me too...)

There are a few house sets out right now, I believe that the names of the sets currently available are "House" and "Beach House". There's also a few larger modular sets out that aren't in most stores (Green Grocer, Market Street, Cafe Corner, etc).

This particular model has been built by a few LUGs overseas, but is based on a set that was widely available for about a year and a half - I believe it sold out this past spring. My guess is that the LEGO company just didn't realize how popular this set would be (or how many alternate models we'd make with it), so they just didn't make enough of them. As far as I know, there are no plans to make more 4954 sets, but that could change.

Personally, I'm hoping to see them release more sets like this one in the near future - the windows available in the parts palette now are considerably nicer than the ones they used in this set.

I don't have my list of links handy anymore (my laptop is still out of commission), but I think the official LEGO site has the best value on most of these (Amazon and Bricklink are generally worth checking too, to compare prices, and you can use Google Product Search to look at some smaller stores' pricing too). There's also a new Castle set coming out in January which is great for us town fans - I'm looking forward to covering that set here soon.

4954's not nearly as good of a value anymore - it was actually an amazingly cheap value when it first came out, but it's not really worth it anymore now that people are trying to sell it for several times the original price.

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